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NRC approves TerraPower construction permit
Today, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it has approved TerraPower’s construction permit application for Kemmerer Unit 1, the company’s first deployment of Natrium, its flagship sodium fast reactor.
This approval is a significant milestone on three fronts. For TerraPower, it represents another step forward in demonstrating its technology. For the Department of Energy, it reflects progress (despite delays) for the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP). For the NRC, it is the first approval granted to a commercial reactor in nearly a decade—and the first approval of a commercial non–light water reactor in more than 40 years.
Katsuo Suzuki, Koiti Watanabe
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 2 | February 1996 | Pages 145-154
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35184
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method of nonlinear filtering is applied to the problem of estimating the dynamic reactivity of a nonlinear reactor system. The nonlinear filtering algorithm developed is a simple modification of a linear H∞ optimal filter with a nonlinear feedback loop added. The linear filter is designed on the basis of a linearized dynamical system model that consists of linearized point reactor kinetic equations and a reactivity state equation driven by a fictitious signal. The latter is artificially introduced to deal with the reactivity as a state variable. The results of the computer simulation show that the nonlinear filtering algorithm can be applied to estimate the dynamic reactivity of the nonlinear reactor system, even under relatively large reactivity disturbances.